The German War (31 page)

Pushing on into Pochep alone and unarmed, Robert began to feel apprehensive, uncertain whether the village was still being defended. Meeting whole families carrying their beds and other possessions into the streets, he tried to reassure them that no one would burn down their homes. He felt overwhelmed and ashamed by their gratitude as they rushed forward to kiss his hands. A woman led him to a courtyard where a table and chairs had been set out, and made him sit down and share milk, bread, lard and butter with her family. She sent food back to his comrades in the potato field and children brought the men water to drink. The battle over, the German panzers moved on. Lying under the stars, replaying the day’s events, Robert wept and fell asleep. Writing home to Maria the next day, he admitted that many villages were less lucky, caught in the crossfire of the Soviet and German artillery. The skirmish for Pochep was the start of the advance of Guderian’s panzers from the north, and Robert R. was serving in one of the leading motorised infantry regiments.
⁴⁵

A week later, as the column halted in the rain for the night, men from the 3rd Company mistook some of Robert’s comrades for Russians as they sat talking and laughing in a village house and threw a grenade inside. One man was killed outright, another so badly wounded that the platoon leader shot him, and a 10-year-old Russian girl lost an eye. As the motorised infantry moved on, the rocking of the vehicle sent Robert to sleep. Again he dreamed of Maria: this time they were walking in the countryside. A swarm of Red Air Force planes came, but Maria did not recognise them and he did not want to alarm her. He was wearing his uniform, and so tried to hide in some bushes, where he was discovered and grabbed by the back of the neck. ‘Officers question me and order me to be taken away. I ask to say goodbye to Maria and am allowed to. I hug Maria and lift her off the ground and we weep bitterly,’ he jotted in his diary. Robert woke up when the truck stopped, its way blocked by a bomb crater and dead horses. In the woodland to the left, near wrecked vehicles and corpses, he saw women’s clothing. He also found a waterproof bag, which he took to keep his things dry, still ruminating about the fears he had expressed in his dream.
⁴⁶

Robert R. hated the war, and his diary carefully chronicled what he wanted to explain to Maria when he was home again. It was here, rather than in his letters, that he described the shooting of prisoners and how his comrades set fire to houses: this was for ‘later, when we are together again’. But the more he detested the war, the more he convinced himself that this time it must be fought to a conclusion: he had to prevent his 2-year-old son from becoming the third generation that had to fight in Russia. ‘No, that must never happen, that Raini should ever have to come here where I am now!’ Robert wrote to his wife. ‘No! No! Rather that I came again, rather that I go through all hells once again and die there. This finest lad, whose picture I carry with me now, whose golden locks have sucked up so much sun. I thank you for giving him to me.’ Above all, he assured Maria that he was protected by their ‘transcendent love, which shares in all the love of the whole world’. For a man like Robert R., therefore, the horrible conduct of the war both unsettled him and intensified his commitment. Such a war must never come home to Germany, and it had to be won decisively. Soldiers and their families identified the war, not with the Nazi regime, but with their own intergenerational responsibilities. It proved the strongest foundation for their patriotism.
⁴⁷

The 2nd Panzer Group continued to advance south into Ukraine. As long as the Wehrmacht had been heading for Moscow, the huge westward bulge of the Soviet south-western front had pinned the Germans back on three sides, threatening to become a springboard for an attack northward into the rear of Army Group Centre. Instead, by swinging south from their most advanced positions on the Moscow highway, it was the German tanks which were now poised to slice through the rear of the Soviet armies. Pushing up from the south, Kleist’s 1st Panzer Group met Guderian’s thrust from the north at Lokhvytsia on 14 September, encircling the entire Soviet south-western front. At 4.30 a.m., Wilhelm Moldenhauer found a moment to write an excited letter to his wife about ‘A new great success, which is still not being spoken of yet for understandable reasons’. He followed military protocol and did not divulge where he was, but did tell her that all through the day and night he could hear ‘how our trucks and now and then heavy tracked vehicles rumble over the bad cobbles of these streets’. In high spirits, he and two comrades went in search of a statue of Lenin and then held mock revolutionary speeches in a bookshop.
⁴⁸

Three days later, as Moldenhauer’s unit advanced further into Ukraine, he was welcomed into one of the cleanest houses he had yet seen, where he was given milk and shared the family’s meal of baked potatoes, cabbage and meat. After he returned from duty at 8 p.m., his hostess welcomed him back with more milk and pork fat; in return, he produced a bottle of vodka. For the next two hours, while the entire family sat around the large table, he took a good look at the living room, to describe it later to his wife, its table lit by a petroleum lamp, the gilded icons glinting in their glass cases against the whitewashed walls. Moldenhauer felt that the welcome was utterly genuine. ‘And perhaps for that very reason,’ he wrote home to his wife Erika on 17 September, ‘because communism directed its strong, warmongering propaganda against Germany and because they suffered so much under Soviet and Jewish rule. And now the Germans are there and the people can convince themselves again and again that the Germans are nice decent chaps. That demolishes all the enemy propaganda at one blow.’
⁴⁹

As the Soviet south-western front tried to break out of its encirclement, the German armoured divisions that had closed the eastern side of the pocket came under intense pressure. On 22 September, Lieutenant Fritz Farnbacher was in the forward observation post of his 103rd Tank Artillery Regiment, when he heard the first shouts of ‘The tanks are coming!’ One of the heavy Soviet tanks immediately scored a hit on a German troop carrier. Hiding in little hollows and pressing their faces into the soil, the Germans hoped that the tanks would not see them. If it had not been so dangerous, Farnbacher would have laughed as he watched them playing hide-and-seek with the steel monsters. He was astonished by the speed with which the Soviet tanks could turn, and surprised that the 37mm German anti-tank guns made no impact on their armour plate. When a tank suddenly headed straight for the ditch where Farnbacher was lying, its looming mass blotted out the daylight. He lay there hoping that it would roll harmlessly across the top, but one of its tracks slipped into the trench, threatening to squash him. Crawling frantically to his right, Farnbacher just managed to get clear. The track missed his left foot by 2 centimetres, its steel links ripping the hem of his greatcoat. The small engagement cost his unit eighty-nine dead and wounded. The division lost five field howitzers, three anti-tank guns, two infantry guns, three heavy machine guns and two troop carriers, alongside ammunition boxes and other equipment. The survival of Farnbacher’s gun battery owed most to the Germans’ tactical ability to compensate for inadequate equipment through the use of radio communications and combined arms. It was the united power of field artillery and the Luftwaffe which drove off the tanks.
⁵⁰

By the time Farnbacher wrote up his diary, he was already moulding the narrative to fit his romantic preconceptions of war, dwelling on the dying words of a comrade who had asked their commander, ‘Captain, if I return, and I hope that’s very soon, can I remain a soldier?’ To which the officer ostensibly replied, ‘My boy, but of course, you remain a soldier!’ As Farnbacher imbued the young man’s death with the heroism and comradeship he himself had hoped to find in the war, he created one of those minor battlefield legends which soldiers lived by.
⁵¹

On 18 September, Kiev fell. On entering the city the 296th Infantry Division found its inhabitants impoverished, undernourished and apathetic. As Wilhem Moldenhauer put it, after seeing a 3-year-old child with ‘an unnatural appearance’ and terribly thin legs lying on a bed, he was reminded of ‘our propaganda posters about the conditions in the Soviet Union’. Watching a column of 9,000 Red Army prisoners file past on 20 September, Moldenhauer struggled to grasp the scale of their victory: ‘The column of the defeated had no end. That an army thrown together from this mish-mash of peoples can defend itself so toughly is astonishing. It also clearly only worked under the knout of the commissars.’ In total, over 660,000 Soviet soldiers surrendered in Ukraine. It was the greatest German victory of the war so far. But the most pressing question everyone asked was, ‘Are we staying here for the winter or not?’
⁵²

On 23 September, Fritz Probst arrived in Kiev with his engineering corps and, over the next month, they rebuilt the great bridge over the Dniepr which the Red Army had blown up. A father of three, Probst had been called up along with other reservists in their early thirties at the end of August 1939, and had already served two years. In 1940 and 1941 he had followed the front, rather than taking part in the battles, managing to send raisins home from his most recent posting in Greece. His first impressions of the Soviet Union were not hopeful. The retreating Red Army had created a wasteland. ‘I have already seen terrible images of destruction,’ he wrote to his family, ‘and can only tell you, you should thank the Führer that he has liberated us from this danger.’ A few days later, he returned to the theme:

What we’re doing is a great sacrifice, but we’re doing it gladly, because if this war were waged in the Fatherland, well, then it’d have been much worse . . . If these beasts had come to Germany, then it’d have been a much greater misfortune for us. We just have to put up with it and perhaps the victorious end is closer than we think.

While the words and sentiments of this self-employed carpenter and convinced Nazi from Görmar, a small town in staunchly Protestant Thuringia, differed sharply from the humane and sentimental Catholic teacher Robert R., both men were nonetheless convinced that this was a defensive, ‘preventive war’. And they both hoped that one final push would finish the campaign.
⁵³

Within days of the German entry into Kiev, the fires started. With their long timer delays, the mines planted by the retreating Red Army and NKVD created havoc and set fire to entire neighbourhoods. In the 296th Infantry Division, Lieutenant Reinert raged against the Bolshevik ‘beasts’ and observed how the ordinary Kievans, ‘their eyes filled with fear of their own countrymen’, were turning to the German soldiers for protection. To Reinert it was clear who was to blame. ‘The police drive the instigators of this sub-humanity together: the Jews,’ he noted. ‘Revolting types pass the car, faces you’d want to trample on with your boots, Jews, who hid till now in their cellar dwellings and now have been driven into the daylight by the raids.’ He believed that the prime movers were long gone: ‘These aren’t the Jewish wire-pullers who give the orders – they vanished in time – it’s their willing tools, the vermin of this city.’ In fact, the Wehrmacht knew about the Soviet fuses with thirty-five-day timers and had issued instructions to the troops the day before they entered Kiev to expect booby traps throughout the city. But they also believed that the Bolshevik dictatorship was Jewish rule, and so they did not protest about the mass round-ups of Jewish men. Shootings of Jews began in Kiev on 27 September.
⁵⁴

By this time, Lieutenant Reinert, along with most of the 296th Infantry Division, had already left the city, but some of the men relayed the news. ‘There have been fires for eight days already, all done by the Jews,’ one wrote on 28 September. ‘For that the Jews aged between 14 and 60 years old have been shot, and the wives of the Jews are still being shot, otherwise there’s no end to it.’ The Jews of Kiev were taken to Babi Yar, a ravine just 4 kilometres outside the city, where the SS
Sonderkommando
4a and two police battalions shot 33,771 Jews over the next two days. Carried out with the approval of the commander of the 6th Army, Walther von Reichenau, Babi Yar was the greatest single massacre of Jews on the eastern front. Johannes Hähle, a war photographer with the 6th Army, got there in time to photograph the SS searching through the piles of clothing abandoned in the ravine. He sent the roll of Agfa colour film home to his wife.
⁵⁵

Within a month, the ravine was also being used to carry out collective reprisals against the non-Jewish population of the city. A hundred people were shot on 22 October, 300 people on 2 November, and 400 on 29 November. The reprisals were not for attacks on Germans, but for acts of ‘sabotage’: explosions, fires at a city market and cutting German phone lines. Ukrainian engineers and factory workers were astonished by the Germans’ lack of interest in getting industrial production up and running in the city. Workers in the mining and metalworking plants took the initiative themselves, recovering machines and parts which they had hidden in wells and ponds to save them from Soviet evacuation measures. Apart from a handful of strategic enterprises, such as manganese mining at Nikopol, the Germans did little to organise industry. It was not part of their plan.
⁵⁶

Ten days after the capture of Kiev, on 30 September 1941, the Economy Inspectorate South banned the supply of food to the Ukrainian capital. Experts had calculated that the food stocks of the city would be exhausted by this date. The city’s pre-war population of 850,000 had already been halved, thanks to Red Army recruitment, the Soviet evacuation of civilians and the German massacre of the Jews. Ukrainian and German policemen now set up checkpoints on the roads and the bridges, stopping cars, carts and pedestrians, confiscating food and barring peasants from entering the city. Kievans who fought their way to the head of the bakery queues were rewarded with bread made from millet. Dubbed a ‘brick’ for its clay-like texture by some, ‘emery’ for its yellow shine by others, the bread fell apart into hard crumbs, which were difficult to digest and tasted bitter because barley, chestnuts and lupins had been added to the dough. Its quality continued to decline. By November, the city had gone ‘dead’ during the day, with a few Germans and policemen in the streets, alongside motionless beggars with amputated or swollen limbs. A Ukrainian teacher jotted in her diary on Boxing Day 1941,